Software engineer Joshua McKenty had worked on enough open-source projects by 2010 to know that the Global Earthquake Model (GEM) was not on a path to being open source.
With stints at NASA, Netscape, and a consultancy leveraging open-source tech, McKenty had experience designing publicly collaborative code, using a shared, continuous-release philosophy known as Agile.
He and the earthquake scientists knew their teams could use a little Agility.
Helen Crowley, former researcher and GEM’s secretary general, said scientists at the time only thought they knew the definition of open source.
“For us, it meant maybe you would make your software available somewhere at the end, once it was ready for other people to look at. But I think what Josh really explained to us is that it had to be developed in the open as well,” Crowley said.
McKenty shared how he helped to turn GEM—and develop its software engine OpenQuake— into an open-source, community-driven initiative, literally bringing together two teams that hadn’t always shared the same spaces: developers and scientists. The process involved a lot of Agile, which in theory meant iterative development and in practice meant offsites in the mountains and paired programming at desks.
“I focused a lot more on cultural transformation, rather than just, ‘Let’s produce software and feel proud of ourselves,’” he told us.
The invite. In 2010, McKenty was asked to review the then-in-progress Global Earthquake Model, which at the time was on year two of a five-year grant.
The GEM team wanted to create an open-source model to estimate earthquake-related impact and calculate human or economic losses for a collection of assets—the kind of tool that could help everyone from city planners to insurance providers.
“You need to have a first release now, not at the end of five years, so that you build a community around the software,” he remembers. That meant changing development practices.
McKenty took a six-month contract as interim secretary for IT—moving to Italy and occasionally commuting to the GEM office in Switzerland.
A work in progress. The definition of software, McKenty says, is it will be wrong—often because of a communication problem between the person with the problem and the engineer building the solution.
And that lack of cooperation exists at a wide range of organizations, not just the ones making earthquake models.
A global survey of 3,500 developers, published in July by Atlassian, found 55% of knowledge workers had difficulty tracking down information despite knowing a lot of people at their job,” and 56% said their companies “plan and track in different ways, which makes it hard to collaborate.”
Sprint to the finish. Principles in the Agile manifesto, created in 2001, include tenets like delivering working software frequently, collaborating with business and developers, and reflecting regularly.
McKenty saw an occasional lack of agility (there’s that word again) in the methods of scientists, who often need their software to work just once in a lab, McKenty said. An open-source tool like GEM, however, had to work constantly for a world of contributors.
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In those six months, McKenty shook up the team, focusing on collaboration. It was not uncommon for a scientist and programmer to pair up on a task like simulating the shaking of the Earth. With this setup, no one had to wait for an email about which of a library’s many algorithms best resembled earthquake movement.
“You understand the science and I understand the software, and let’s make that work minute by minute, instead of month by month, or requirement by requirement,” he told us.
With McKenty at the helm, GEM’s team of coders and scientists produced a new feature or version every two weeks—what Agility proponents often call “sprints.”
Crowley remembers an offsite code sprint in Switzerland—“a weekend featuring lots of couches and pizza and just a good atmosphere.”
During McKenty’s tenure, the team had 20 or 30 releases, McKenty said, that culminated in OpenQuake 1.0’s release in 2013.
The GEM Foundation’s OpenQuake has been used in recent years to determine risk profiles for public schools in Peru, roads in Solomon Islands, and buildings in San Francisco. In December 2018, GEM “achieved global coverage with a total of 30 national and regional seismic hazard models.”
“I am more proud of OpenQuake than anything else I’ve ever worked on, because I spent six months and I got the community in this sort of shape, and I let it go,” he said.
McKenty is currently CEO at fraud prevention company Polyguard.
You’re not wrong. Agile, as a practice, is hanging in there, even as the idea of paired programming these days might involve a vibe coder and their LLM.
A Forrester report from this year polled global pros with knowledge of their company’s Agile practices and found that 61% of respondents have been using Agile practices for over five years, and 24% have deployed them within the last three years.
The ability to work in agile, cross-functional teams is increasingly important to IT pros, according to McKenty, who sees the source of good, working software as a collaboration between human teams talking to each other, sharing spaces, and trying to close up a gap that’s always open.
“I think that’s the definition of every software project; usually the product owners or the customer have an understanding of what they want, but not how to make it happen, and the software team has an understanding of how to make it happen, but not actually what they want. And so building good software is about being able to communicate across that divide.”